Subject: Re: [bug#28638] [PATCH] doc: Suggest decreasing bytes per inode.

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2017 10:19:50 -0400

On Tue, Oct 03, 2017 at 03:14:35PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Mohammed Sadiq <[email-masked]> skribis:
> > +As the store (@pxref{The Store}) shall be having lots of directories,
> > +symbolic links, and small files, the inode space may run out before
> > +the disk space is filled, especially if the partition size is small.
> > +Decreasing the bytes per inode shall be better to avoid related issues.
> > +So, with partition @file{/dev/sda1}, and with a label @code{my-root},
> > +bytes per inode can be set with:
> > +
> > +@example
> > +mkfs.ext4 -L my-root -i 8192 /dev/sda1
> 
> Are you sure that this suggestion helps fix what you experienced?
> 
> I’ve used ext4 partitions much bigger than this but I’ve never needed to
> pass “-i 8192” or similar.

I've also not run out of inodes on my ext4 system that was set up with
Debian's defaults.

Also, it may be better to recommend creating the filesystem with more
inodes than usual, rather than reducing the size of the inodes. From the
man page mkfs.ext4(8):

-N number-of-inodes
       Overrides  the default calculation of the number of inodes that
       should be reserved for the filesystem (which is based on the
       number of blocks and the bytes-per-inode ratio).  This allows the
       user to specify the number of desired inodes directly.

But then you are really asking for too much expertise when installing
Guix, in my opinion.